Nostalgia

I have always felt guilty about not keeping a baby journal for the boys. I was always given them as baby presents but always got carried away with every day life to keep up. I found photography as a much easier way to capture their life and so there are no shortage of those! I still carry a camera with me everywhere. No scrapbooks, no funny sayings, but lots of evidence. But when I found this entry of a day in the life of Ronan when he was 2 years old (underneath a pile of everything this while cleaning this weekend) , it made me completely nostalgic and I wished that there were more pages full of memories. But, hey, it's a little freakin' traumatic having a baby at 40.

There were only 3 entries.

One on first day I wrote:

Dear Ro -
Although I have not kept a journal for you up until this point I have a "photographic" journal. That's my thing. I'm a photographer and have taken many funny pictures of you and your brothers. Many things that you do will also be about your brothers, so I'm hoping to follow through on this one!
You are my heart, my love, my 3rd son, my surprise! I love you, Mommy.

2nd day:

Sept. 4, 2003
Today was the boys' 2nd day of school. You cried and said "no-bye" "no-bye" as the bus drove away with your buddies. We watched all the fun shows today. Teletubbies, Clifford, Caillou, Arthur and whatever else we could find. We read, colored with markers - which ended up all over your clothes...and you moved all the juice from the deck to the kitchen floor - because you said "not dare" (not there!). You took the apple pie off the counter and it fell all over the floor. I banged my head against the refrigerator.

3rd day:

Sept, 7, 2003
Today you saw I was wearing a bandanna as a headband and so you needed one too! You wore yours like a "doo-rag" and learned to say "dude!" You laughed a lot.

I let the guilt carry me for a while, as I usually do. And then I re-read the entries and realized that I was, we all were, so busy with the "doing" that it rarely left time for the "writing."

Hey, I took good care of that kid. I let him get messy, move stuff around and obviously didn't make him move out of the house for wrecking the apple pie.

Also, let me be PERFECTLY honest, he was really hard to take care of. Such a pain-in-the-butt. He was spoiled, he was stubborn, impossible a lot of the time. He just squawked until he got his way. He wore me out. But I always loved the little dickens more than life and he has cracked me up as many times as he has made me pull my hair out.

What naturally happens with our "right now" life is that we don't find it that extraordinary. So what, we watched Caillou? So what you moved the juice? So why write about this everyday stuff?...is probably what I was thinking. Never realizing, of course, it would be the stuff magic and memories are made of. Really. What I wouldn't give to drop in on that day and be a fly on the wall. And the cliche comes true, turn around and the 2 year old is now 8, turn around and the young brothers on the bus are now 15 and 17.

And so I speak only for myself, although all moms as well...

I am a good mom
I always try my best
I'm not riding the guilt train (today)
yes I wish I had a blog in 1992 or 1994 or 2003
or kept a better journal
but I didn't
but we cooked and we painted and we planted
went apple picking and to the beach
learned to ride a bike and tie your shoes
went sledding and made Christmas cookies
went to the Museum of Natural History in NY
just because you liked dinosaurs
and good enough really is good enough
so I will put that slim little journal away
someplace very safe
make some brownies and enjoy the right now